What I want to do this morning is more by way of exhortation, setting a vision before you. It's not so exegetical. And I think you'll see why in a moment, but I want to start with this passage of scripture. Second Kings, chapter five. Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master and honorable, because by him the Lord had given deliverance into Syria. He was also a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper. And the Syrians had gone out by companies and had brought a captive out of the land of Israel, a little maid. And she waited on Naaman's wife. And she said unto her mistress, What God my Lord were with the prophets in Samaria for he would recover him of his leprosy. And one went in and told his Lord saying thus and thus said the maiden to the land of Israel and the king of Syria said go to go and I will send a letter unto the king of Israel and you know the story from there. My I'd like to draw your attention to the little girl. We don't know her name. She was from Israel. Now reminding you quickly of the geography and history of the time. God's people had been split into two kingdoms, north and south. Judah was to the south, ruled by the sons of David. Israel was the northern kingdom. Its capital was Samaria. It was ruled by a succession of apostates and idolaters, some of whom gave lip service to Jehovah after fashion. North of that were the Syrians. At least that's what the Greeks called them, but the Greeks named everybody wrong. They called themselves Aram. Their language was Aramaic. It eventually became trade tongue for much of the Middle East and parts of scripture written in this language the Lord spoke when he was on earth, at least one of them. But the Bible, the King James calls it Syria, following Greek tradition. And Syria and Israel, the northern nation, were at this point in constant wars back and forth with one another. And during one of the raids, this Syrian general, Naaman, or probably someone working for him, had made It made a sortie into Israel and captured a bunch of people. And amongst them was this little girl. We're not told how old she is. Just from my experience with young people and children, I'm guessing she's under 12, but it doesn't say. In fact, I suspect she's quite a bit under 12, but again, it doesn't say. She's little. as is the way of things, she gets farmed out to one of the Syrian lords, in this case, to Naaman's household, and she becomes a maid, a servant, a slave for Naaman's wife. Naaman's a great general, a mighty man of valor. He's the king's right hand, we find out as the story unfolds. Very important to Syria. And here's this little girl who's been torn away from her family, her nation, and whatever religious support instruction she's had and she's going to live it seems in the home of a pagan idolater for the rest of her life. This would be a wonderful opportunity for bitterness or apostasy or giving in or going with the flow. And yet we only get really one one sentence out of her mouth but what a testimony. Would God, my Lord, were with the prophet in Samaria for he would recover him of his leprosy. First of all, notice. Well, notice a few assumptions in her mind. First of all, leprosy was often regarded by God's people as a specific judgment from God for great evil, because often it was a specific judgment from God for great evil. And so it would be very easy for her to assume, well God, name it did this wicked thing to my people, but God's getting him now. But there's no hint of that in what she says. She makes a couple of other interesting assumptions. She assumes that the prophet, this would be Elisha, the prophet in Samaria would, well first of all, could heal him or cleanse him. Though, as far as the record goes, no prophet had ever cleansed any leper. The only leper that had ever been cleansed at this point was Miriam, and that was by God directly inflicting her and then taking it off a week later. She also assumes that the prophet would heal her master, even though he's the enemy. He's one of them. He's one of the bad guys. In fact, the bad guy who's holding her captive and keeping her away from her family, if her family's even alive anymore. Notice the great compassion, the evangelical heart this little girl has, the great faith she has, and the perception. You either have to say she's naive like everything, or she has fantastic spiritual perception. And I doubt that the Bible would hold the former up for admiration, whether it's the latter. The Bible is commending this young girl to us for her great faith, and her spiritual penetration. She sees something that other people wouldn't see. And our Lord comments, not on her specifically, but on the situation, because he says in Luke, I believe it's Luke 4, that there were many lepers in Israel at this time. God didn't heal any of them. And no doubt the little girl knew that. And yet she believes that God would heal this Gentile, this enemy of Israel, this slaughterer of innocents, possibly the murderer of her own family, because she has a heart of compassion and tenderness for him. She believes the Gospel. And it's because of her off-handed remark that the whole story of Naaman is set in motion, and we get an entire chapter of Scripture and our Lord's commentary on it. Look! So she's a catalyst for some very important things in the Bible. What kind of spiritual education did she have? We're not told, unfortunately. Obviously, God didn't want us to know exactly, or he would have written it in. But I, for one, would really like to know. There's a similar case. I won't have you turn there, but you know it well. It's the case of Moses. Now, we know a little bit more about Moses. You remember the whole thing of the Ark and the Nile and all that. Actually, in the bulrushes, it did not float on the Nile, contrary to the movies. That would have been stupid. We read the text, Jacobed put it in the reeds where the queen, the princess came to bathe and where crocodiles don't go, they don't like bull rushes. And the princess discovers it and Miriam offers the services of a Hebrew nurse and goes and gets her own mom, Moses' mom, and the princess delivers the baby up to Jacobed. Weaning a child in those days generally took around three years, a little more, a little less, until the child was completely free of the nurse. And the nurse might hang around in the background, often did. But it would be for those three years that the nurse would have time to actually work uninterrupted, without any interference with the young or young charge. And when Moses comes of age after his stint in the public schools of Egypt, misery and you. He knows all the wisdom of Egypt, such as it was, and yet he has not sold out to Egypt. He refuses to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and he chooses to suffer affliction with the people of God. What did Jacob do in three years? Because that would have been the time. God rarely grants us five-step programs or ten principles or nine rules. Life isn't that simple, nor should we try to make it so. I want to give you some suggestions this morning about teaching your children or grandchildren or children in the congregation or in your classroom the Bible. I'm not going to be particularly exegetical, except insofar as I do it by nature. I'm not going to flip you from passage to passage. I basically want to do a cord dump of things I've learned over the last 30 years. And you listen, and please feel free to interrupt and ask questions. Or if I'm not clear about something or I say something that doesn't sound quite right, please, please interrupt me and say so. First of all, before I jump into teaching the Bible, we need to understand that Bible teaching, and in the larger sense, Christian education, is not something that saves people. You cannot save people by teaching them the Bible. It doesn't matter how much knowledge you put in their head, that doesn't save them by itself. But it is part of this whole thing that we call covenant living, that Elder Seidel has been talking about and will continue to talk about. And at this point, we have to factor in our prayers for our children, our honesty before them, our humility to come and say, honey, I was wrong. Please forgive me. We need to talk about the life of the church. We need to talk about bringing them to worship and teaching them how to worship. We need to talk about how about getting them plugged into the life of the church. So it's like the people here are not just people they see and whose names they know and they have nothing to do with. They need to be praying for them, helping them, volunteering to serve them, talking about the Bible with them, all of this, all of this and more, presenting them for baptism, catechizing, taking them through the confirmation process, encouraging them to come talk to the elders, making sure, by the way, they're not afraid of the elders. Yeah. Every time we finish interviewing someone, a young person, for confirmation afterwards, I always ask, was that scary? Were we mean? Did we do anything we shouldn't have to scare you? They usually say something like, no, you guys are pushovers. What was I saying? Okay, tell your friends. It is important that the young people of the congregation know that they can talk to us and that we're not going to bite their heads off or turn a deaf ear because they're under 18 or something. or under 25, or whatever. So all of that goes into it. And oh yeah, also the spankings. But that's not what I want to talk about tonight. So I'm assuming all that, and it's all terribly important. Elder Schlegel will be talking about some of it, at least in broad principles. But I want to talk about Bible teaching. I want to, let's see, how many points do I actually have? One, two, I think about four or five things, a couple of them pretty short. First of all, as we come to teach children or anyone the Bible, we need to consider it, first of all, as history and a story. The Bible is a book. In fact, it's more profound than it sounds. It's not a hodgepodge of journal articles. It's not a random collection of meanderings. It's a book. It has a beginning. It has a middle. It has an end. It has a theme. It has a plot. It has a point. It actually has lots of points. And there is historical literary flow to the whole thing. Now, when I was a young person, 16, 17, 18, someplace in there, the evangelical churches that I knew and the Christian radio I listened to, seemed to think that when someone came to Christ for the first time he needed to get them to read two books in the Bible, John and Revelation. John, I imagine, because the promises in some respects seem clearer there than in the other Gospels, and Revelation because, of course, that was tomorrow's headlines and Jesus was coming back any day. Ever just opened John 1 and noticed the kind of things that are there? Let's see, the word, lagos, tabernacled, Among men, we have priests, we have the Lamb of God, we have the temple, we have the religious purification ceremonies, we call baptisms. There's a ton of stuff there that's rooted solidly in the Old Testament and that nobody's going to get just by reading John. That's not to say that you can't read John the Prophet, but there's a whole lot of stuff that you're going to miss if you don't know the Old Testament. And Revelation? There's a reason it's the last book in the Bible. I've been teaching through the Bible to my students in school for a number of years now. And generally, by the time we start in Genesis, we go all the way through. Generally, by the time we get to Revelation, they're not really having a whole lot of problems with it. I simply have to stop when they realize, wait a minute, what the Bible is saying is not what I've been taught, and then I have to stop. It's not my job to push them over the brink at that point, whether they can read the Bible themselves or not. But if you try to start there, you'll never get it. I think I may have done this here before, but I'm going to do it again anyway. I've done this a number of times. Listen to this, and I know many of you will recognize it, those of you who don't need to watch older movies. So Inigo killed the six-fingered man. Wesley had been mostly dead all day. Buttercup jumps into ill-infested waters. There was a mighty duel. Both were masters, but they survived the fire swamp, for this is true love. Now, most of you know where that's from, right? Say it as you say something. Now, what's wrong with the way I told it? It's all mixed up. Now try this one. So, David killed the giant with a sling, and Jesus rose from the dead. No one built an ark, and the animals came on two by two. Elijah ascended into heaven, but Judas betrayed Christ, and Daniel survived the lion's den, for God still loved the world. Now, when I turn to my kids at school and say, now, how many of you learned the Bible like that? About half the hands go up. That's how I learned the Bible. Bits and pieces here and there, no particular order, no sense of flow, no sense of... Nehemiah comes after Ezra and has to because of, and they fit here with regard to Kings and Chronicles because there's none of that. We get random stories in random order, and oftentimes we have no clue why they're there or why God was telling them in the first place. I mean, they're stories. They're also true histories. And they're part of a historical flow. And to understand them, you have to know the historical context. What came before what follows? Several months ago now, maybe a year or more, I was teaching here from, I was teaching about Solomon's Temple. And I tried to just start in Kings and teach Solomon's Temple. That doesn't work. So I tried to go back to the tabernacle. Guess what? That doesn't work either. I had to go back to creation. I stopped that one. The next time I said, we're going to start in Genesis. We do the Garden of Eden. Then we do the tabernacle. Then we do the temple. OK, now click, click, click. Everything begins to make sense. If you don't work from the Bible's own order, you're going to have problems making sense of things. That's just the reality of it. Now, I don't know if this is a sub-point or the next point, but the book of Revelation chapter 19 tells us the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. The Bible is about Jesus Christ. And there's a danger of trying to shoehorn specific images of the gospel in, but I think there's a far greater temptation to miss him completely. And when you do, weird things happen. Elder Johnson mentioned in one of our meetings the other day that he'd like to hear some teaching on the Kingdom of God, particularly with respect to Gospel preaching. Because when you come to the Gospels, Jesus and John and the Apostles are preaching the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. But when you get into the Book of Acts, the Apostles are preaching Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Is that a different Gospel? What happens if you read the Gospels, but don't read Acts? Might you get the idea that it's enough to announce Jesus as the coming king? You might, if you miss everything else and if you don't finish out the story. Because at that particular time, Jesus had not revealed all of his cards yet. Yes, the kingdom of heaven was at hand, but he had not explained in detail the nature of the kingdom. And that waited on the cross and the resurrection. You have to finish out the story oftentimes. And if you just drop in, you may miss the gospel, even from Jesus' own lips. Most of you know who C.I. Schofield was. When he read the Sermon on the Mount, he said, that's not gospel, that's law. Because it's all about telling you how to live. That's the law, that belongs to another dispensation. Now, that's because he misunderstood the whole flow of the story. If you come there and drop in and all you see are those commandments without context, you could easily assume, well, this is a bunch of, this is how I live if I want to get blessed and have God's favor. But that's not what Jesus is saying. And if you read the whole Bible, you'll know that's not what Jesus is saying. People do that with the law of God in the Old Testament. Some of our friends in parish church organizations seem to give the idea that if you keep God's law, you will be blessed. Oh yes, you come to Christ by faith. But then you keep God's law, you're blessed. That's not what the law is saying. It's not that simple. And if you present it just like that, you've got a gospel of salvation by works. Certainly the law of God is important, but that's not the way you say it, and that's not the way Confessions of the Church said, and that's not the way the Reformers said it. So, as we read the Bible, we need to point to Jesus. The genealogies point to Jesus. The kings of Judah point to Jesus. The constant failure of Israel points to their need for Jesus. The sacrifices, the temple, cleansing ceremonies point to Jesus. The prophecies point to Jesus. At any time that God is speaking, is Jesus speaking? The angel of the Lord is Jesus. The spirit of Christ animated the prophets. These are New Testament assumptions, which we may not learn until we get to the New Testament. And that's the beginning. Now, practically, some things about teaching the Bible to anybody. There are a lot of things in the Old Testament particularly, because they're new to the Old Testament, preparatories laying the ground, that are detailed and long. We need to memorize them, or read them so much that we just learn them that way, which is fine, probably better. Here are some specifics. You can just check them off in your head. If you say, I know those, well then, give God the glory. First of all, obviously, the books of the Bible in order. That's the easy one. The six days of creation. What did God do on each day in detail? The ten commandments. Well, our church, we recite them, so that's good. The six covenants of promise. And yes, I believe there are six. You can argue with me about that some other time. The five Levitical offerings and the seven festivals. God spends a lot of time with them. The uncleanness laws. Between the sacrifices, the festivals, and the uncleanness laws, you've got the book of Leviticus. And it is in the Bible, however much we like to avoid it. The floor plan of the tabernacle, and after that, the floor plan of the temple. And why are they different? The succession of the kings of Israel and Judah. God gives them. There must be a reason for it. There is. There's a lot of reasons, actually. Those are just some of the things and they're easy and and elementary students even even first and second graders can learn them and They begin to open up the Bible because they they prepare us for patterns and sequences and events that become very later Oh, yeah, the whole geography of the Holy Land, obviously that everybody should know that you should know Where the Dead Sea is you should know where Jordan is you should know where Galilee is you should know where? Judah and Israel were. You should know where the tribes more or less were. Judah's to the south. You should know that there are Transjordanian tribes. You should know that Syria's to the north, and Assyria to the north of that, and north and east, and Babylon south of that, along the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley. This is the world of the Bible. And then Egypt's down here in the Mediterranean. You can't understand what's going on if you don't know where things are. And these are not hard things. Really simple things. And as you teach these things to young people, to children, a couple more very specific suggestions. One, read the Bible. Not a Bible storybook. Read the Bible to them in order. You may have to explain some things and for simplicity's sake, at times, carefully, you may want to skim or skip. Maybe, I do it for time's sake sometimes with my kids, but you know, the very things that most people want to skim are the ones I run into and sometimes my little girls don't notice and sometimes they do raise their hand and say, what's a harlot? You know, it's like, okay. Well, time to talk about that, I guess. And that's my next point. Answer the questions. Seriously, at length. at their level, in the words they can understand, and then assume you're going to have to do it again in two weeks, and then in two months, and then in two years. Keep coming back, keep questioning, keep asking them. Do not assume that because you taught them they got it. Even if they did get it right then, the odds of them remembering it tomorrow are only 50-50. That's true of teenagers. I'm sure it's true of smaller children. Next. Teach scriptures theology. Now, I believe in teaching the Bible through in order as history literature. I also believe that we have to teach the system of truth that's contained in scripture. Catechism is a useful tool, or it can be. Let's face it, most of us struggle with some of the language of catechism. Even if it were translated into modern English, we would struggle with it because it's the language of theologians who are trying to bring a lot of material down into a very small scope, and they've done it very well. But you try to communicate that to three-year-olds or five-year-olds or ten-year-olds, it doesn't always work that well without a lot of explanation and slow-plotting teaching. Now, I'm going to say two things that sound contradictory, and they're not at all. One, have them memorize it thoroughly, word for word, without explaining anything. Two, explain everything. These are two different things. Because one day, they're going to go back and they've memorized it, especially when they're really young. They're going to know it for the rest of their lives. I memorized part of the Catechism when I was about sixth, seventh grade, and I still remember what I memorized. It didn't go away. I didn't have a clue what it meant back then, but I do now, and I'm very, very glad that I have. It's very useful. But my understanding did not track with it. The understanding, though, will catch up, and you have to keep working on the understanding, and you have to use words that children can understand. And sometimes you're going to have to, especially when they ask, you need to stop and you need to explain the words. And sometimes you need to ask them, what does this word mean? Just out of the blue, driving home from church over to the dinner table. What does this word mean? You get some interesting responses. Sometimes they'll surprise you and be right. Often they'll just say, I don't know. It's a big people word and big people use words like that. You're just supposed to memorize them and say them back and everything's good. Yeah, that's what we want to avoid. I can guarantee you that the little maid here in Second Kings understood the gospel. It wasn't just a bunch of words in her mind. She probably knew all about the feast and festivals and the tabernacle and all that, but she understood the gospel. Her parents had made it very clear to her that God's grace was for the world and that God is gracious. In very practical ways, he saves people. And that we have to keep driving home. It's not about having a bunch of knowledge for its own sake. It's about the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It's about the gospel. Again, I'll challenge you. Go home and ask your kids, what is the gospel? See if they can tell you. You may be surprised for good or ill. as we teach the gospel against very specific things real fast one avoid cliches all of where all the phrases that you understand or that you think you understand your children probably don't have a clue on born-again washed in the blood raised from death to life transgressions and iniquities ask them if they know what those mean and the odds are most of them don't here's here's the grand cliche of all time Jesus died for our sins now Almost every time I've had to teach younger children, or I've worked with our teachers who teach younger children, they don't have a clue what that means. Why did Jesus die for our sins? Because he loves us. But why did he die for us? To save us. Yes, but why did he have to die? To save us from our sins. But why did he do this? Because he loves us. But why was death necessary? So he could save us from our sins. Try it and see what happens. Teach from Scripture. Memorizing the Catechism isn't the same as understanding the Doctrine. Use the Creed and Confessions for summary and for consolidation. Years ago, when I first started teaching adult Sunday school in another life, the elders came to me and said, we have these Norman Jones workbooks, but people don't understand them. So we'd like maybe you to teach Explain the books. And I said, you want me to explain the books and explain the catechism and explain the Bible? How about if I explain the Bible? And then when we're done with this lesson, I'll read the catechism, and we'll see that it's just what I've been saying. It worked really well. It's a danger of piling up too many things between us and the Bible. They need to read the Bible. They need to see the theology is in the Bible. Don't just teach them. Teach them the doctrine, but teach it to them from the very words of Scripture, so that when they find the words of Scripture, they will say, oh, there's that doctrine. Not, well, I know justification by faith is biblical because my pastors and elders said so. I don't really know where the Bible teaches it, but I guess it does someplace. That's not useful. Or not as useful as it could be. Explain the difficult words. You will be surprised what difficult words are. The first word that we encountered in teaching our children was the word die. They were about three and two and one, someplace in there. Or maybe the, Mary Ellen may not have been born yet. Daddy, what does it mean to die? They've never seen death. The only thing they've seen that I could appeal to was there have been some spiders in our house and I smushed them. You remember when Daddy smushes the spiders and they don't get up and they don't move anymore and they just kind of sit there gory? That's dead. You will be surprised at what words go over children's heads lately. And this is not a criticism of anybody, this is just the reality of small children. We try to encourage our children to take notes. The two of them have hit upon the idea of writing down all the words from the sermons they don't understand. And on our way home, I get to give a vocabulary lesson. Some of them are biblical words. Some of them are just ordinary words. Some of them they should know. Some of them, yeah, OK, that one's kind of hard to explain. It's very easy to talk over the head of small children. But that doesn't mean they're stupid. I know we have two new teachers at school this year. haven't been with us and don't know our history. This is cool. And they both sort of had the idea, well, these are children, they don't know much and they can't do much. And both were shocked when they saw what the curriculum requires of them, using the King James Bible of all things. But they found out, wow, these children can actually understand the King James Bible, they understand the stories, and they already know more than I thought they could. They were very impressed, but that's not anything great enough. That's the fact that children are human beings made in the image of God, and they don't have to wait until they're 10 or 12 to start understanding theology. They can start right now. You just have to put it in words they can get a hold of. And the more you do that, the more they can get a hold of. I promise you that. And then as we do this, we need to make application to life, their lives. What does this mean? One of the first verses my children learned was, children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Lots of applications, just all over the place. But there have been others, things about being wise in your own eyes, lots of things that are very applicable. What does this mean for you? How does this fit into our experience right now? What does this mean for you today at school or at home or with your sister? And again, we don't separate this from all the rest of life. There are lots of wonderful teaching opportunities which is what Deuteronomy 6 commends to us. When you rise up, when you sit down, when you walk by the way, when you've had a fight with your little sister, when you've just broken something and tried to hide the fact, when a man out of a job shows up at the door and wants to work for money or food or anything. Everything is an opportunity to talk about God's Word and to teach it. And it all needs to fit together. One of the worst things you can do is have this special teaching time where now we're going to talk about the Lord. Don't do that. That's horrible. You should be able to slide in and out of any conversation about God. In fact, you should never technically ever leave a conversation about God. He should always be the subject of every conversation we're having. And you never have to stop. Okay, now we're going to get spiritual. If you couldn't invite God to watch the movies you watch, participate in the games you're participating in, read the books you read, hang out with the friends you hang out with, you've got a problem. Because the Holy Spirit dwells in us. And everything should flow naturally back and forth, in and out, of simple conversation about God and His mercies, His law, His providence, without any sense of suddenly getting phony or super spiritual. This is the nature of teaching the Word of God. Well, I'm running out of time, so I'm going to skip to the last point, which is this. Preaching of the Word is a means of grace, and more generally, the Bible is a means of grace. Now, the Bible focuses upon preaching for lots of reasons, and that's for another time. But the Bible is the living Word of God. It's able to make us wise unto salvation. It's not simply a matter of knowing its information and knowing its facts. This is the way that God changes the hearts of his elect. This is how God brings his people to faith in Christ. This is the tool of regeneration. And it's very easy, I have found, after teaching reformed young people for 30 years, for them to get the idea, even if they know better, that if they have learned all the right things and jumped through all the right theological hoops, that either they're saved or At least the church thinks they're safe and will leave them alone now. Sometimes they understand that that's not what it's all about, but they think that we don't. And I've heard accusations against Reformed churches, including our own, from our own young people, that our emphasis is about learning doctrine, not about knowing Jesus. Now that's not true, young people. You haven't been listening right. I'll tell you now, in case you've missed it. Learning doctrine, memorizing your catechism doesn't save you, doesn't regenerate you, but it's an incredibly valuable tool and part of the process of learning about God and his word and learning to live a Christian life. And you despise such things at your peril. What better things do you have to do with your time, honestly, than learn the word of God? I know young people who can tell you all about the Star Wars universe or the Star Trek universe or the geography and history of the Middle Earth, but they don't know the Bible very well. You can do both. But if you have the time for the one, you have the time for the other. And we should not be hearing complaints about how hard catechetical work is. I didn't say it wasn't hard. I just said we shouldn't hear complaints about it. I have three children. I know they have their issues. But it's taken for granted and it's not a subject for debate. It's part of the process, because they know that this is part of what we all do together. It's not some weird thing that mom and dad are forcing on them, or that a weird church is forcing on them. This is how Christians live their lives, and they just take it for granted, even when it's tough, and even when they'd rather not do it. But all of these things, God works together to bring about faith in the hearts of His elect. Now, one last warning. When we have said and done all of this, We are unprofitable servants, and there is no absolute promise in Scripture that we will have won our children's salvation by our efforts, because salvation is by grace and through faith in Christ. Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated, before the children were born, having done neither good nor ill. The purpose of God according to election I stand. God's predestinating grace, God's sovereignty, trumps covenant promises. Covenant promises are general, but God nonetheless does delight to save the children of his people. And if we ignore the promises and provisions of the covenant, God may save our children anyway. We'll have to answer for our neglect, but God can save them without us. And we may do everything right, and they may not come to faith. But it's our responsibility, and it should be our delight and joy, to enter wholeheartedly into this covenant life with our children and with the whole congregation and everyone else's children. Because this is how God has chosen to do things and it's good. And it's right. And it's full of joy. And we need not to chafe at it. We need to be excited about it.